Katie: You're listening to The BusinessMakers Show, heard here and online at theBusinessMakers.com/overtime. Today's guest is a creative geek with a penchant for community building that I know you're going to love. Please welcome Amit Gupta, head honcho at Photojojo, author and coworking movement inspirer. Amit, welcome to The Overtime Show.

Amit: Thanks. Happy to be here.

Katie: Yay! And so you are calling in from sunny San Francisco where a lot of our listeners are probably gonna be hugely jealous of you right now. So (Laughter) -

Amit: Occasionally sunny San Francisco.

Katie: Occasionally. Okay. Okay (Laughter) so Amit, tell us a little bit about Photojojo for any of our listeners that haven't had their minds blown on your website yet. What's it all about?

Amit: Well, Photojojo's all about helping people have more fun with photography. We started about four years ago as a newsletter. We published photography tips, tutorials, fun things you could do with your photos after you took 'em, couple times a week, by email and that's really where it all started. We just thought, "Hey, we see so many people taking photos. We see so many of those photos ending up on their computers, just kinda getting forgotten and why don't we come up with some clever, fun and creative ways for you to do things with those photos?" Over the years we've added a lot of other stuff. We've started a form of the site. We started doing events called photo safaris. We launched an online store where we collected and sold the most crazy, fun, unique things having to do with photography that we found and I think that brings us up to today.

Katie: Excellent. Now, so for anyone that hasn't been in your online store before, what kind of fun, unique, quirky things do you have in there?

Amit: We've got stuff like adapters that you put on your camera called a spy lens so it looks like you're shooting forward with your digital SLR but you're actually shooting to the left or the right. So -

Katie: That's awesome.

Amit: -you can get kind of candid street shots or shots of your kids who might be a little photo shy normally but might not notice that you're pointing it at them 'cause you're not pointed at them. We've got tripods that will stick to anything; stick to glass, stick upside down, hold your camera basically anywhere. We just started selling this new Fuji Instax camera. We've been selling one of these Instax cameras - they're like instant cameras made in Japan.

Katie: Oh.

Amit: But we just got the newest one in from Japan. So that's really cool. Lots of fun stuff.

Katie: Fantastic and I think one of the things that's coolest to me about the Photojojo world is I feel like I'm inundated with a lot of, you know, only digital - here's cool stuff to do on Flickr-type stuff - which you talk about but a lot of your projects and tips really go into, you know, shooting with film or creating, you know, these crafty do-it-yourself like tactile projects, which is really so cool. You know, you really take it, kinda, old school but new school at the same time. (Laughter)

Amit: Yeah, totally. No, we love the real world. I think just there's definitely something still to be said for paper and for printed photographs and we love to help people explore that if they're shooting digital or, you know, we have a bunch of projects and fun stuff you can do with film, too. It's actually been really interesting, I think, that film's had a resurgence over the last year and you're seeing a lot of younger people starting to get back into it. Almost kind of as a retro thing 'cause you can be really creative with film in ways you can't with digital. So it's really inspiring and awesome to see that start to happen.

Katie: It is cool. I feel like we're seeing a resurgence, like, you know, I love vinyl. I collect vinyl and to me, like the film and the vinyl, like, "Yes!" you know, "Happy days are here again!"

(Laughter)

Katie: Taking it in a little different direction. I love it. So now Photojojo isn't your first entrepreneurial endeavor. What other kinds of businesses and people have you worked with in the past?

Amit: Started a company my sophomore year of college called The Daily Jolt and ended up taking some time off school, two and a half years, to raise money and run that during the first, kinda dot com bubble. And then after college, I went back and finished, I worked with this guy Seth Godin, who is kind of a hero of mine and somebody who I'd been following for a long time and he wanted to do a startup project called ChangeThis, basically a non-profit that was gonna explore interesting ways to spread ideas, business and political ideas using the Internet. He ___on me and four other people and we were kind of his interns for the summer, building this site and building this community. And then I ran that for, I think, about six months after we built it before we found someone to take it over and yeah, after that I did a bunch of consulting, _____ability stuff for clients at Pierson and Apple and found myself doing this Photojojo thing in my spare time and before I knew it, it was an obsession.

Katie: Wow. And here you are. (Laughter) So how did Photojojo start? I mean, did you always have this photography bug in your world or what prompted it?

Amit: Yeah, I was always - I was taking photos as a kid. I took a bunch of classes when I was in high school and I actually built, you know, like my own concentration in high school on digital photography which was super, super new at the moment, like the stuff that I was doing at the high school to actually buy, like a new computer and buy a digital camera so it was like an Apple Quick Take 150, one of the first few models and started tinkering with Photoshop and doing all sorts of cool stuff and then got to college and really kind of stopped because I was so into the digital about the end of high school and I couldn't afford a digital SLR, 'cause at the time, they were, you know, $5,000.00 to $10,000.00.

Katie: Oh yeah.

Amit: And if you wanted a digital camera you were really stuck with something that just didn't have a lot of manual control. So I stopped shooting anything but snapshots for maybe four years and really just got back into it when I moved to New York and SLRs were approachable. Not cheap, still, but approachable and man I was living in the most photogenic city on earth. So it was kinda hard not to -

Katie: Exactly. You're sort of required to, you know, document the experience.

Amit: For sure.

Katie: So I know that you have just this enormous, you know, following and newsletter base but what are some of the challenges that you've been facing at Photojojo these days?

Amit: I think that the hiring is always something that we take a long time to do and always find it takes longer than we expect but we're extremely picky. So I think one of the challenges we face is finding the right person to come and join the team. We're currently in the process of looking for the first marketing person we've ever hired, the first person who's just gonna be focusing on spreading the word, which is really exciting for us and we just started looking at the beginning of April. So we have had, I think, 420-something applications. We've interviewed something like 50 or 55 people.

Katie: Cool.

Amit: We're still chugging along. So -

Katie: Wow.

Amit: That's been a recent challenge; finding the right fit for this particular role.

Katie: Absolutely well, and with such a unique, definitely public facing culture and personal facing culture, I'm sure that, you know, really getting the right kind of creativity and, you know, the right kind of skill sets is important but what do you, what are you really looking for? I mean, I know that you have such a tremendous web presence. Do you want super geeky or like, what does a company like you look for when they're hiring?

Amit: In general, I think, we're looking for someone who, first of all, is obviously passionate about photography. They've gotta really love this stuff but then beyond that, like it depends on the position but the things that we're looking in - for whichever position it is is stuff like being able to figure out what you need to do and do it. I'm not a big fan of managing people, honestly, and I prefer to work with people. So I'm always on the lookout for folks who can take responsibility, want responsibility and can figure out what they need to do to meet their goals. And then I get to work with creative, awesome, hard-working people, which is what I wanna do.

Katie: Exactly. That's excellent. Now, do you have any advice for any budding entrepreneurs out there? I mean this isn't, certainly, a new came for you. What do you wish that the 19-year-old Amit had known way back when?

Amit: I guess I wish I had known that the hardest thing about doing all this stuff is just starting and it's actually not that hard to start and I wish that I had realized earlier on how willing people are to help. I think that whenever I approach somebody for advice or for pointers or just for anything, really, everyone was so open and so willing to give of their time and that's something I forget, even now, because people wanna help each other and I think that when you're starting something new and you're really passionate about it, people wanna be around you and people wanna help you make it happen. So I guess those two things: just start and ask for help.

Katie: That's awesome. That's very good advice. So one final question for you. What is the last photo that you shot? If I was to look at your camera, right now?

Amit: I usually try to take a photo of people right after I meet them. I forget about half the time. So I just had coffee with my friend, Derrick, but I forgot to take his picture, I just realized, and yesterday I had lunch with his wife, actually, Heather and I did remember to take her photo. So that's the last one I took.

Katie: That's awesome and are you talking about Derrick Powazek and Heather Champ?

Amit: Yep.

Katie: That's awesome. So photo love all the way around. Flickr.com and Photojojo. (Laughter) Excellent. If you are interested in getting in touch with your internal photo geek, make sure you make your way on over to Photojojo.com and pick up a copy of their extremely awesome book, also called Photojojo in Urban Outfitters and other fine book establishments and connect with Amit and the crew anywhere that is cool is go online, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and beyond. Amit, thank you so much for being on The Overtime Show today. You're fantastic.

Amit: Thank you.

Katie: And that concludes our interview with Amit Gupta of Photojojo. Hey business all-star, you're listening to The BusinessMakers Overtime Show, heard here and online at theBusinessMakers.com. That wraps up our exciting Chapter 2. We'll see you in Chapter 3 as Esther, John and I go over the basics of podcasting. See you there.